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“It’ll happen. It may age me by ten years— but it’ll happen. It’s a great fit for the buyers, a great price for us, and the best thing for the company. It’s a win all the way around. Slide those veggies down here.”
    I did, and helped myself to a skewer of chicken satay. “Are they still asking you to stay on?”
    Jane winced and shook her head. “It’s just a crush,” she said. “They’ll get over it.” She got up and gathered her papers and stacked them on the kitchen counter. She saw the tulips there. “These are pretty.”
    “They’re for you,” I said.
    Jane smiled. She opened a cabinet beneath the counter and came up with shears and a blue glass vase. She slit the wrapping on the tulips and snipped an inch from the bottom of the stems. Her movements were quick and sure. She ran water in the vase and put the tulips in.
    “Nothing they can do to make it worth your while?” I asked.
    “Nope. The buyers are okay, but it’s still a big company and way too much of a boys’ club. There’s no way I’d sign up for that again.”
    After B-school, Jane had done time at a prestigious investment bank and at a big management consulting firm, and both experiences had filled her with a fierce resolve to be always self-employed.
    “Besides,” she said, “it’s been a long year. I’ve got another few weeks on this deal, and all I want afterward is to ride into the sunset.” Jane looked up at me. “Have you thought any more about riding along?” she asked, and the air seemed to thicken between us.
    In the brief reprieves she granted herself from the office and the culmination of her deal, Jane had been planning a very long vacation, and she’d invited me to join her. Guidebooks and travel magazines had been turning up in my apartment for weeks now, and we’d been tiptoeing at the edges of this conversation for almost as long. Each time we did, it was a cautious tug-of-war, a wary testing of resistance and balance over suddenly unstable terrain. And each time left us both a little edgy.
    “Sure,” I said.
    She cocked an eyebrow. “Sure, you’ve thought about it, or sure, you’re coming?”
    “I’ve thought about it. I’m still thinking about it.”
    “Thinking that it’s a good idea?”
    “That it’s a good idea, but …”
    Jane looked down at the flowers. “But what?”
    “But I took a job today, and I don’t know if it’ll be a long one. I have to see how it plays out.”
    Jane pursed her lips and nodded minutely. She stared at the tulips and spent a while rearranging them in the vase. “I guess your trip to Brooklyn went well,” she said eventually.
    “Well enough,” I said, and I told her about my meeting with Nina Sachs and my lunch with Tom Neary. She listened carefully and shook her head when I was through.
    “If it was anyone else, I’d say maybe he’d run off to hide his face in shame. But as it’s Danes, my bet is that some investors bought him a room at the Jimmy Hoffa Hilton.” There was a wry twist to her mouth and I was relieved to see it.
    I laughed. “Do you know the guy?”
    “Just from the stuff in the papers— about Piedmont— and from when he was on Market Minds all the time. I remember the bratty know-it-all attitude. I was actually referring to the whole analyst species.” She opened the fridge and took out a bottle of seltzer. She brought it and two glasses back to the table.
    “You have it in for them on general principle, or do you have a more specific grudge?”
    Jane filled the glasses. She drank from hers and stretched her legs out. “Both, I guess.” I raised my eyebrows, and Jane continued. “I never had illusions about analyst independence. I knew who paid their bonuses and who they were beholden to— and it certainly wasn’t the investing public. I mean, the notion of getting an objective opinion about a company, or an unbiased recommendation about its stock, from somebody who’s essentially a paid pitchman for that company—